In A Few Years, One Out Of Every Four Cars On Roads Globally Will Be Connected To The Internet

The car is becoming a critical battleground for tech companies, software developers, and startups, according to a report from BI Intelligence. In no time at all, Internet-connected cars will present a massive consumer tech market.

BII

Five years from now, there will be over 250 million connected cars on the road globally, according to estimates from the GSMA and others.

That's roughly 25% of the 1 billion cars the International Energy Agency expects will be on the road by then. According to the GSMA, 58% of the cars manufactured in that year will offer some sort of connection to the Internet.

Car-focused telecom, hardware and software services will drive some $51 billion in annual revenue by 2018.

Here are a couple of examples of how car and tech companies are competing to drive in-car information and entertainment: At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month, Google unveiled a new plan that will allow car manufacturers to use a version of its open source Android smartphone operating system. Android will power car's dashboard-based information and entertainment systems – no doubt with the help of apps like Waze, which Google purchased in mid-2013.

For Apple's part, the iOS 7 platform specifically included a new feature, iOS in the Car, that basically ports iOS 7 into a car's multimedia system.

To state the obvious: Cars are inherently mobile. Many of the things people do in their cars — listen to music, look up directions — mesh nicely with popular app-mediated activities on mobile gadgets. Americans spend an average of 1.2 hours a day traveling between locations and an average of 38 hours a year stuck in traffic. If mobile apps and Internet-based services can shoehorn their way into the in-car environment, that means a great opportunity to absorb consumer attention, and gather data. Not to mention, current dashboard "infotainment systems" are mostly terrible.